PHILADELPHIA -- Violent teenage crime rose as much as 69 percent in the last decade, but the perpetrators were mostly a small group of 'nasty, brutal' repeat offenders influenced by drugs and a harsh inner city lifestyle, a study shows.
Martin Wolfgang, professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, studied police and school records of 28,000 Philadelphia residents born in 1958. He compared the figures with a study he conducted in 1972 of 10,000 people born in 1945.
Wolfgang said the study conducted for the Department of Justice showed 'not more kids getting into trouble, but the same small number committing more crimes and more violent crimes.' He called the violent teenagers a hardcore 'small number of nasty, brutal offenders.'
He also suggested the increase in violent crime was caused by greater drug use by youths of the 1970s.
'Heavy amount of drug use is not at all present in the 1945 group,' Wolfgang said. 'Of course, in the 1958 group we have hundreds and hundreds of arrests.'
Wolfgang also said the general tone of inner city living 'encourages a subculture of violence.'
'The whole social process of growing up tolerates and sometimes encourages the use of physical aggression to settle disputes, often when there is slight provocation,' he said.
The report also said the 1970s youths caused 'an escalation of violent criminality, a fearful phenomenon for the general population, and a surplus of cases for prosecutors and judges.'
The study was aimed at determining whether the rising youth crime rates in the last decade were mainly a result of the greater number of youths born at the height of the baby boom or if 1970s youths were actually more criminal than those of the previous decade.
About a third of either group were found to be likely to commit crimes before the age of 18, he said. But the chance of those crimes being violent ones, such as homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, was 69 percent higher in the youths of the 1970s.
The study also showed the gap between white and non-white youth violence narrowed between the 1960s and 1970s.
Wolfgang said among those born in 1945, violent crime by non-whites was 15 times higher than that for whites. In the 1958 group, non-whites had a violent offense rate seven times that of whites.
